The silence of the shepherds on homosexuality: An interview with Robert Reilly

August 29, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – Robert R. Reilly was Special Assistant to U.S. President Ronald Reagan and, more recently, Senior Advisor for Information Strategy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He is well known for his work at Voice of America and his 2010 book The Closing of the Muslim Mind. But his most recent book, Making Gay Okay, can’t seem to get reviewed in the major publications where all his other works have found favor.

LSN: In your book, you note that natural law is the basis for opposition to the culture threatening acceptance of homosexual behavior. In recent months, we’ve seen this particularly threaten Christians and Catholics yet few Catholic leaders dare to speak about it.

RR: Natural law teaching is at the heart of the Catholic Church. It appears both faith and reason are being abandoned at the same time in favor of sentimentality.

It seems that some Church leaders have fallen in line with this (gay) agenda, or at least have maintained complete silence in the face of it. Silence implies consent.

It is very demoralizing that not more of them have stood up against this grotesque lie about humanity.

LSN: Why the silence from Church leadership?

RR: We can find part of the answer in St. Augustine’s City of God. In Book One, Chapter 9, he wrote: “We tend culpably to evade our responsibility when we ought to instruct and admonish them [the ill-doers], sometimes even with sharp reproof and censure, either because the task is irksome, or because we are afraid of giving offense; or it may be that we shrank from incurring their enmity, for fear that they may hinder and harm us in worldly matters, in respect either of what we eagerly seek to attain, or of what we weakly dread to lose.” I think this explains a lot.

From history, however, we should not be too surprised at the silence or the complicity. Remember Peter Kreeft’s brilliant line, “The first Bishop to accept a government grant was Judas.” Under Henry VIII, only one Bishop stayed faithful, St. John Fisher. (We are certainly doing better than that today, thank God!) I have been reading My Battle against Hitler, by the great Dietrich von Hildebrand. In it, he recounts how some Catholic bishops intellectually collaborated with the Nazis, gave into and actually promoted the rationalizations necessary to accept the legitimacy of Nazi rule.

LSN: Don’t you think it is over the top to make an analogy to the Nazi times?

RR: I don’t think it’s a stretch to point to Nazi Germany in 1935 as an analogy to current events. That is when the Nuremberg Laws were passed, stripping Jews of their German citizenship and forbidding marriage between non-Jews and Jews.

No doubt, there were still many fine and upstanding people in Germany at the time, including many Catholics, but from then on they had to keep their mouths shut about the Nazi racial superiority teachings because they were state law. I am sure there were many people opposed to the race theory of history who said to themselves, as people do today regarding homosexual “marriage,” “Well, this is a losing issue. Let’s leave it alone and move on.”

They were probably too frightened to consider what they were moving on to, just as people today avoid thinking about the consequences of the complete denial of reality involved in homosexual “marriage.” Anyone who thinks that we are involved in a denial of reality any less profound than that of 1935 Germany is kidding themselves. Success for the LGBT dream requires the obliteration of the real and the removal of those who insist on the existence of reality.

LSN: What do you make of the approach of some Catholic bishops who have chosen, when asked about ‘gays,’ to selectively quote from the Catechism those teachings that align with the times — those who quote only “They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.”

Of course, the real issue today is not “unjust discrimination” toward homosexuals but forced submission to the LGBT gender ideology. The largely phony discrimination issue is used as a weapon to demand complete conformity with the LGBT agenda. I tell the full story about how this enforcement is taking place in my book, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything. The people suffering discrimination today are the ones who insist on telling the truth. George Orwell remarked that, “The more a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.”